Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of The USS Enterprise E You Need To Know

According to Geordi LaForge at the start of Star Trek: First Contact, the Enterprise-E had been in service for almost a year. As the destruction of the Enterprise-D occurred in Star Trek Generations only two years prior, that's a fast turnaround for something as complex as a Federation flagship.

In a 1998 AOL chat (yup), Star Trek: First Contact co-writer Ronald D. Moore tried to clear this up, stating that the Enterprise-E's quick launch was due to the ship actually being built under another name entirely. Though this bit of background was never included in any canon production, Moore explained:

[The] working assumption was that the Enterprise-E had her keel laid sometime during TNG's last season and was probably going to be given another name. When the Enterprise-D was destroyed, that Sovereign-class ship was nearing completion and was then christened Enterprise. This same sort of thing happened during WWII. After the carrier Yorktown was sunk at Midway, the US Navy decided to rename a carrier then under construction in honor of the fallen ship.

This isn't the first time a starship was assumed to be renamed to carry on the Enterprise legacy. According to the Great Bird of the Galaxy, Gene Roddenberry himself, the Enterprise-A had previously served under the name Yorktown. Non-canon sources have variously given the Enterprise-E's original name as the USS Sentinel as well as the USS Honorius.